Auxilio: A Sensor-Based Wireless Head-Mounted Mouse for People with Upper Limb Disability

Upper limb disability may be caused either due to accidents, neurological disorders, or even birth defects, imposing limitations and restrictions on the interaction with a computer for the concerned individuals using a generic optical mouse. Our work proposes the design and development of a working prototype of a sensor-based wireless head-mounted Assistive Mouse Controller (AMC), Auxilio, facilitating interaction with a computer for people with upper limb disability. Combining commercially available, low-cost motion and infrared sensors, Auxilio solely utilizes head and cheek movements for mouse control. Its performance has been juxtaposed with that of a generic optical mouse in different pointing tasks as well as in typing tasks, using a virtual keyboard. Furthermore, our work also analyzes the usability of Auxilio, featuring the System Usability Scale. The results of different experiments reveal the practicality and effectiveness of Auxilio as a head-mounted AMC for empowering the upper limb disabled community.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Morph ; Constructing identity : how the experience of cyberspace contributes to the emerging story of self in young people

PhD ThesisThis thesis develops from the belief that young people construct identities for themselves which inevitably surprise their parents, particularly where so much of their coming-of-age is influenced by hidden virtual experiences. The novel which explores this is Morph . Joey, the protagonist, is uneasy about her gender. She has a loving family, intelligence, a satisfying way of life, but loathes her body. She investigates alternative futures, initially online. Her closest friend also has a secret, revealed after a suicide attempt that Joey averts: sexual abuse by her father. Each has to discover how to live with the evolving sense of self. If Joey wishes to change gender her character may alter, too; she finds she can be violent when confronting the abusive father. The story is told through Joey’s eyes and activities in cyberspace, which she thinks of as a free place, parallel to the mountains over which she loves to run. She feels at ease in both places. Eventually she decides to live as both male and female (Other) because she does not have a ‘condition’ needing to be cured. Classification in the natural world allows for infinite variety, and she want similar opportunities for herself. The critical aspect of the thesis begins with those aspects of my experience which affect my conception of the narrative, including how, as a teacher, I drew upon insights from neuroscience about the malleability of the self. I analyse a series of interviews with young people about how they present themselves online. Since the trigger for the novel is online disclosure of gender variance, I explore what is available online, current medical attitudes and policies; I set the interview findings in the context of theoretical frameworks for personal and group identity. I conclude that where young people lack frameworks for interpreting virtual experience, the emerging sense of self may be destabilised, or even impaire

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

\u3cem\u3eSang the Sun\u3c/em\u3e

This novel is not about a man who knows exactly what he wants out of life. This novel does not have a readily identifiable narrative arc with characters who have readily identifiable motives compelling their actions. This novel is about a man, who despite having all kinds of outward signs of success, cannot figure out why he must leave it all to find something else in another place. Even after he’s found it, he’s not even sure what it is. In short, this novel is about real life

Post truth, justice, and the feminine way: an examination of justice and female agency in mainstream American conspiracy films from the 1970s to present with the aim of developing politically forceful narratives

The American conspiracy film is at a crossroads where, if it continues to apply 20th century paradigms and moral expectations onto 21st century narratives, the genre stands to lose its political force and relevance -- subsumed by a proliferating conspiracy culture. This thesis draws on the relationship between conspiracy film and conspiracy history to identify a steady loss of political force from the 1970s into the 21st century as justice evolves from public-facing to private-facing, culminating in the genre’s present ‘lame duck’ period. This paradigm of depleting political force does not apply to female-led conspiracy narratives, for whom strides in women's liberation off-screen translate to augmented female agency on-screen, leading to greater senses of justice and political force as they progress into the 21st century. My catalogue of over 100 data points indexing the patterns, motifs, characters, and characteristics of American conspiracy films over the last 50 years led directly to my original contributions of knowledge: my three-phased classification of justice in the genre and creation of discourse dedicated specifically to female conspiracy protagonists, along with the multitude of new terms introduced to analyse, qualify, and augment the political force of conspiracy films (i.e.: ‘tradition 1 and 2 narratives’, ‘privatisation of the antagonist’, ‘corruption of the protagonist’, ‘utility of the team’, etc.) By utilising a dual methodology of critical film analysis (contextualised amidst contemporaneous socio/historical/political events) this thesis examines what happened in the conspiracy genre, whilst employing practice as research through a hauntological lens in order to question, investigate, and propose: what next? In doing so, three core elements of the conspiracy narrative (the Protagonist, Behemoth, and Mechanisms for Justice) are updated and fortified against solipsism and cynicism with practical techniques to employ; for when truth cannot be trusted, it is justice that will ignite conspiracy narratives’ political force

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 1: Change, Voices, Open

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 1 includes papers from Change, Voices and Open tracks of the conference

“Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self, and play in this chaotic situation”

Title: “Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self, and play in this chaotic situation” Ralph Dorey, Northumbria University, 2020. This research brings together resonating creative processes from feminist literature, game design, queer gender politics, post-structuralist philosophy, and horror cinema. It uses these to articulate an art practice which is unstable and generative both for the artist during the process of production, and again for the audience. The PhD output as combined thesis and practice consists of three books, each approaching the question, “How to negotiate art practice as involving processes which are unstable, affective, and resistant to structures?” Each book takes a different position regarding this question and in doing so reshapes it into a sub-question. The book “Ahuman Desire” explores the question “How to negotiate art practice as involving affects which are at some times indescribable, or overwhelming?” The book “Ahuman Use” explores the question “How to negotiate art practice as involving salvaged or stolen systems, which are always already breaking down?” The book “Unknown Lacuna” explores the question “How to negotiate art practice as involving unstable things which can only be seen through what they do?” Each engages the same question, but with a different emphasis. They are three different attempts and the obvious implication is that these are three of many more potentially attempts. I have undertaken an extensive literature review across fields which border on art practice. The three books bring together a vast matrix research sources and makes these visible and accessible as an act of care, in keeping with the feminist writing practices which underpin the work. I have developed original methodologies which are used in the different documents across the three books and include the use of speculative fiction, plagiarism, formalist writing strategies, drawing, performance, games, and screenplays as research. As well as using artworks as a site to examine the relationships between different theories of creative process. The rigour of the PhD Output exists not just in the scale of the sources processed and responded too, but in its infrastructural approach which departs from academic norms to resist a cataloguing or hierarchical envelope for the knowledges within. The PhD Output addresses one of its returning processes of Excess through its form. It is large in scope and shifts responsibility to the reader to navigate this Excess. This demonstrates the affects of anxiety address in many of its documents, before the aforementioned attention to acts of care re-frame this disorder as generative. This mirrors the repeated conceptual and narrative refrain in many documents whereby the horror of the unknown is reorientated to become a creative and dynamic approach to knowledge which does not need to be fixed or enveloped. The PhD Output aims to support reader engagement based on their desire, rather than through an external economy that ascribes or denies a degree of value based on adherence to pre-existing parameters. This approach is a departure from the common structures of academic research, while still demonstrating critical judgment and original contributions to knowledge. The departure is necessary firstly because of the research questions above, and secondly the commonality of destabilisation in the source materials from feminist writing practices and philosophy, to collaborative games and horror media. Thirdly, the departure enables the specificity of the practice based PhD Output to not just describe processes but to enact them at the reader’s point of encounter with the research. The primary findings of the research are. The potential for the form of Tabletop Role Playing Game Manuals to inform an art practice when combined with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The mutual illumination offered when combined with feminist writing practices or Écriture Féminine. The potential for Écriture Féminine to inform contemporary queer feminist art practices which incorporate the forms of video-games, as well recognising the event of audience encounter with such artworks as a creative one. The use of horror cinema as a means to articulate art practice concerned with affect. The potential of practice-based art research to produce new ways to produce and deliver original research in a dynamic rather than fixed structure. This research is of value due to its relevance to contemporary practice. This relevance is evidenced by the recent attention to queer indie game design (‘Beyond the Console’, n.d.; Faber, 2019; Humphreys, n.d.; Thaddeus-Johns, 2019; Wallace, 2019), experimental feminist writing practices incorporating speculative fiction (Hedva, 2018; Hval, 2018; Jackson & Leslie, 2018; Waidner, 2019), the divisive concept of “elevated horror” (Carrol, 2019; Crump, 2019; Ehrlich, 2019; Gardner, 2019; Taylor, 2019), and the folding of these into art practice. The research include in-depth analyses of artworks by two artists who have relatively recently received a high international profile (Apexart, 2019; ‘Dark Continent: Semiramis Performance | Arts Council Collection’, n.d.; ‘Porpentine Charity Heartscape’, n.d.; Tate, n.d.) and have not yet been the subject of monographs or a large amount of academic study, particularity within the field of art. The relevance of this research is further supported by the recent publications and events in a overlapping fields (Brazil, 2019; Burrows & O’Sullivan, 2019; Editorial Staff, 2019; Fisher, 2018; ‘Flickering Monstrosities Hyperfiction Reading Group’, 2019; ‘ICA | I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker’, n.d.; Lewis, n.d.; Little, 2019; Pyrne, 2019; Shaw & Reeves-Evison, 2017)

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed